Sellfy, the Latvian e-commerce platform, announces a seed funding round led by Skype co-founder Toivo Annus, long-time head of Skype Estonia Sten Tamkivi, as well as several telco executives from a leading Spanish cable operator. Sellfy has produced an e-commerce platform aimed at digital goods on social media, allowing anyone to easily sell their digital wares by just sending or sharing a link. The size and details of the funding round were not disclosed.
I found it interesting that the startup does not run any sort of front-end store where people can find the digital goods on their platform, although Maris Dagis, co-founder and CEO of Sellfy tells us it’s a “thing that we are thinking about constantly.” But expanding their social media angle, Sellfy has now also launched an affiliate program which lets you share a percentage of your proceeds with people who pass your link around. This allows them to earn commissions or discounts on your products in exchange.
Founder Maris Dagis says, “With Sellfy we aim to revolutionize the self-publishing space allowing artists, writers, photographers and other content producers to retain more control from publishers and keep a larger share of their revenues for themselves. We see huge potential in leveraging existing fan base of our merchants to use it as a promotion vehicle for their products.” Sellfy charges a 5% commission on purchases, with no up-front costs.
The Riga-based startup is less than a year old, participated in Startup Highway, and already works with more than 3 000 merchants around the world. For the future, Dagis says, “We plan to introduce more payment options, not only PayPal, as well as develop more features that will allow merchants to customize their product pages.”
You would think it should be easy to sell digital goods, and Sellfy seems to have made it easy. We’ll see what they can pull off with funding.
